The World of Rocket Science and Witchcraft

 

There is more to the practice of Paganism and the development of science and technology than a lot of historians would not go into detail about. The occult means “that which is hidden,” so it doesn’t get talked about much unless you bring up cults or the paranormal.

This changes when you get to important historical figures like Jack Parsons. Parsons was an inventor and engineer who pioneered in rocket engineering and propulsion. He attended several universities, including Stanford, but never attained any degrees. He invented the first rocket jet, and pioneered in both liquid and solid fuel rockets. He was a founder of organizations like JPL and Aerojet Engineering Corporation. At one point in his life, Parsons was also involved with Marxism, and was being investigated by the FBI under the suspicion of espionage. After his death, he was later recognized as one of the most important figure in the US space program, and they have since named a crater on the moon after him.

Parsons was apart of the new Thelemic cult called the ‘OTO’, that Aleister Crowley invented. He converted after reading a few of Crowleys books and had eventually met Crowley and knew him on a personal level. Parson’s involvement in magic took up a huge chunk of his life, one of his biographers noting that

[Parsons] treated magic and rocketry as different sides of the same coin: both had been disparaged, both derided as impossible, but because of this both presented themselves as challenges to be conquered. Rocketry postulated that we should no longer see ourselves as creatures chained to the earth but as beings capable of exploring the universe.

Similarly, magic suggested there were unseen metaphysical worlds that existed and could be explored with the right knowledge. Both rocketry and magic were rebellions against the very limits of human existence; in striving for one challenge he could not help but strive for the other.” – Pendle, George (2005). Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

America’s first rocket-assisted aircraft, developed by Parsons.

In the mid 1940’s, Parsons befriend L Ron Hubbard (before he founded Scientology), and the two performed magical rituals together that they called the “Babalon Working“. Later, after their ‘working’ was done, L. Ron Hubbard would defraud Parsons out of his life savings.

Parsons wrote several books, with such cuddly titles like  “the Book of Babalon” and “The Book of the Antichrist.” The aim of his famous ‘Babalon Working’ was to, in no unclear language, summon the whore of Babalon to the earth mentioned in the Book of Revelations, to aid in bringing the end of all things to come. He believed he succeeded and said;

Its manifestations may be noted in the destruction of old institutions and ideas, the discovery and liberation of new energies, and the trend towards power governments, war, homosexuality, infantilism, and schizophrenia.

This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it. Obviously, its guidance now tends towards catastrophe.

Parson was seriously involved in dark magical ceremonial rites. The obituary of his local newspaper described him as “handsome 37-year-old rocket scientist,” and was “a man who led a double existence [as] a down-to-earth explosives expert who dabbled in intellectual necromancy.” What he wrote down about what he did may be too dark for the average person to read, because its its gruesome, shocking, and very weird.

At one point at the end of his life, he saw himself as the Anti-Christ. His wife, an artist, created a portrait of him as the angel of death. Later in life, because of accusations of espionage, he no longer got to work in the rocketeering field. He died in an accidental explosion in dealing with certain chemicals at his house, working on a project for a film set. Few have speculated that this may have also been either an attempted suicide or assassination.

Parsons standing over a used Rocket-Assisted Take Off cannister

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As a personal anecdote to go with this story; Back in the day when I had a desktop completely dedicated to a Voluntary/Grid computing program called BOINC, developed by Berkeley -which used mass computation for crunching scientific data- I once spoke to a man over the internet who said that he worked at CERN. He relayed to me that he used to be a reader of Crowley and a Thelemic practitioner (for those who may not know, is a modern practice of paganism). While he was very staunch about his previous involvement with the occult, he relayed to me that he quit everything that had to do with it and focused primarily at CERN, because, and I quote: “physics is the new magic”.

I have not been able to confirm that any of that is true- If he really was a physicist working at CERN and if he did in fact practice occultism. The other options are that he was insane or just a troll- possibly all of the above. I have absolutely no bias either way- But I am sure that would make a great plot in a book somewhere.

Dr. Michael Persinger on Psychic Phenomena

Michael Persinger is a researcher in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience with over 200 peer-reviewed publications in circulation. Much of his work has been subject to controversy and scrutiny, as well as praise.

Michael Persinger

During the span of his long career, Michael Persinger, an atheist, developed a controversial field of Neuroscience called ‘neuro-theology’. The main tool used behind this was an invention of his called the ‘God helmet’.Persinger believed that everything about human experience was source ultimately in the brain. That he could cause religious experiences in people using electromagnetic stimulation to the proper areas of the brain.

Needless to say, his work has been mixed with high praise and well as extreme criticism. Professor Richard Dawkins, who used the helmet, did not have any experience at all wearing ‘the God Helmet’. However, British research psychologist Susan Blackmore, said she had one of the most profound experiences in her life. One can find a critical dissection of Persingers “God Helmet” in the book “The Spiritual Brain” written by neuroscientist Mario Beauregaurd.

The greater theory behind his work is that the Earths magnetic fields play a role in peoples psychology and effect paranormal experiences- including everything from spiritual events to UFO sightings. He has claimed that there is some correlation between massive UFO sightings and mass hallucinations with the earth’s plate tectonics- which he called “Tectonic Strain Theory.” The idea behind it is that the earth’s crust near seismic faults creates creates massive electromagnetic fields that could interfere with peoples brainwaves create mass or individual hallucinations on the public at large.

Psychic Ingo Swann

More recently in the 2000’s Dr. Persinger (along with his colleagues) was involved in controlled remote viewing experiments with the famous psychic Ingo Swan -a man who was previously involved in psychic experiments with the US government. Persinger published several different papers claiming that he was able to connect Ingo Swan’s success rate to electro-magnetic activity in his brain, via an EEG.

Persinger developed a technology that he claimed was able to set the brain of even average people on the right frequency to get them to better communicate with others somewhere on earth. That they could see and feel what other individuals were experiencing. Persinger believes that the Earths Magnetic field is the medium that connects peoples minds together. He has studies that showed that success rates correlated tightly with whether or not there was any “noise interference” coming from the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, test subjects had lower success rates when they during geo-magnetic storms, and test subjects had higher success rates when the earth’s magnetic field was quiet, or normal.

Persinger, who is himself a famous and world renowned skeptic, has suggested that science is due for a paradigm shift, and that until we change our fundamental ideas about what the universe is, there are going to be facts about existence that we are going to ignore because they don’t comply with our narrative. Much like the days of old, and our societies geocentric ideas about the world- we very well may be curtailing our findings to fit our worldview, and ignoring a lot of facts about reality.

“I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.” – Persinger interviewed at Skeptico

Persinger believed that increased technological developments and discoveries regarding this phenomena has large implications for the entire world. “What would it mean for governments or administrations if they had no secrets?” He believes that taking a step in this direction of scientific knowledge would help create an Empathic World Civilization.

Quantum Physics in a Macro World

The following excerpts are from an article in the June 2011 Scientific American magazine, titled “Living In a Quantum World,” written by physicist and Oxford professor of physics, Vlatko Vedral. All emphasis is mine.

According to standard physics textbooks, Quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms, and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people, and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins…

[T]his convenient partitioning of the world is a myth. Few modern physicists think that classical physics has equal status with quantum mechanics; it is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum at all scales. Although quantum effects may be harder to see in the macroworld, the reason has nothing to do with size per se but with the way that quantum systems interact with one another. Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may even operate in the cells of our body…

In the modern point of view, the world looks classical because the complex interactions that an object has with its surroundings conspire to conceal quantum effects from our view… Larger things tend to be more susceptible to decoherence than smaller ones, which justifies why physicists can usually get away with regarding quantum mechanics as a theory of the microworld…

[In the world of physics,] Entanglement binds together individual particles into an indivisible whole. A classical system is always divisible, at least in principle; whatever collective properties it has arises from components that themselves have certain properties. But entangled systems cannot be broken down this way. Entanglement has strange properties. Even when the entangled particles are far apart, they still behave as a single entity, leading to what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.”

Most demonstrations of entanglement involve at most a handful of particles. Larger batches are harder to isolate from their surroundings. The particles in them are likelier to become entangled with stray particles, obscuring their original interconnections. In accordance with the language of decoherence, too much information leaks out into the environment, causing the system to behave classically….

   A neat experiment in 2003 proved that larger systems, too, can remain entangled when the leakage is reduced or somehow counteracted. Gabriel Aeppli of University College London and his colleagues took a piece of lithium fluoride salt and put it in an external magnetic field. You can think of the atoms in the salt as little spinning magnets that try to align themselves with the external field, a response known as magnetic susceptibility. Forces that the atoms exert on one another act as a kind of peer pressure to bring them into line more quickly . As the researchers varied the strength of the magnetic field, they measured how quickly the atoms became aligned. They found that they atoms responded much faster than the strength of their mutual interactions would suggest. Evidently some additional effect was helping the atoms to act in unison, and the researchers argued that entanglement was the culprit. If so, the 10²⁰ atoms of the salt form a hugely entangled state.

To avoid confounding the effects of the random motions associated with heat energy, Aeppli’s team did its experiments at extremely low temperatures- a few millikelvins. Since then, however, Alexandre Martins de Souza of the Brazilian Center for Physics research in Rio de Janeiro and his colleagues have discovered macroscopic entanglement in materials such as copper carboxylate at room temperature and higher. In these systems, the interaction among particles spins is strong enough to resist thermal chaos… Physicists have seen entanglement in systems of increasing size and temperature, from ions trapped by electromagnetic fields to ultra-cold atoms in lattices to superconducting quantum bits…

Other experiments scale up this basic idea, so that huge numbers of atoms become entangled and enter states that classical physics would deem impossible. And if solids can be entangled when they are large and warm, it takes only a small leap of imagination to ask whether the same might be true of a very special kind of large, warm system: life…

People have long wondered whether birds and other animals might have some built-in compass. In the 1970’s the husband wife team of Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko of the University of Frankfurt in Germany caught robins that had been migrating to Africa and put them in artificial magnetic fields. Oddly, the robins, they found, were oblivious to the reversal of the magnetic field direction, indicating that they could not tell north from south. The birds did, however, respond to the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field- that is, the angle that the field lines make with the surface. That is all they need to navigate. Interestingly, blindfolded robins did not respond to a magnetic field at all, indicating that they somehow sense the field with their eyes.

In 2000 Thorsten Ritz, a physicist then at the University of Southern Florida who has a passion for migratory birds, and his colleagues proposed that entanglement is the key. In their Scenario, which builds on the previous work of Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois, a bird’s eye has a type of molecule in which two electrons form an entangled pair with zero total spin. Such a situation simply cannot be mimicked with classical physics. When this molecule absorbs visible light, the electrons get enough energy to separate and become susceptible to external influences, including the earths magnetic field. If the magnetic field is inclined, it affects the two electrons differently, creating an imbalance that changes the chemical reaction that the molecule undergoes. Chemical pathways in the eye translate this difference into neurological impulses, ultimately creating an image of the magnetic field in the bird’s brain…

Another biological process where entanglement may operate is photosynthesis, the process whereby plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. Incident light ejects electrons inside plant cells, and these electrons all need to find their way to the same place: the chemical reaction center where they can deposit their energy and set off the reactions that fuel plant cells. Classical physics fails to explain the near-perfect efficiency with which they do so…

The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental. It is just a question of experimental ingenuity, and few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale. If anything, the general belief is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive that anything we have so far…

Synchronicity and The Golden Scarab

Carl Jung was a famous Swiss Psychiatrist who worked in both psychotherapy and analytical psychology. He was a student of Freud’s who played a huge influence in a number of fields, including psychology, literature, archaeology and religious studies.

Probably most famous for his theory of the “Collective Unconscious.” Jung believed that all religions  were linked together, and that all spiritual experiences people had came from the same source, and that this could be traced across all cultures of people through their common religious beliefs and myths about the world- many of which who had no connection to eachother.

Another theory of Jung’s was the theory of Synchronicity. Jung worked on this theory with the famous theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli- who was a pioneer in the field of quantum physics, and was nominated for the Nobel prize by Albert Einstein.

The theory of Synchronicity has to do with events that appear to be of coincidence, but are tied together by meaning. Two or more events may happen and may have no causal connection with one another, but are none the less related.

Jung posited that Synchronicity was acausal by nature, or came before causality. He believed that forces in a persons unconscious (in the form of archetypes) could bring forth events enfolding in the real world; these events happened in a meaningful manner which defied causal explanation, but often gave way to extreme, life changing epiphanies in peoples lives.

 The following story is an excerpt out of C.G. Jung’s “Synchronicity: An Acausal connecting principle.”

“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab-a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabeid beetle common of rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now begin with satisfactory results.

This story is meant only as a paradigm of the innumerable cases of meaningful coincidence that have been observed  not only by me but by many others, and recorded in large collections. they include everything that goes by the name of clairvoyance, telepathy, etc., from Swedenborg’s well-attested vision of the great fire in Stockholm to the recent report by Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard about the dream of an unknown officer, which predicted the subsequent accident to Goddard’s plane.

All phenomena I have mentioned can be grouped under three categories

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer’s field of perception, i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward (e.g., the Stockholm fire).
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.

According to Jung’s theory, there may be no coincidences, or at least many of the coincidences people experience are not coincidences at all. What many might see as a coincidence is actually a manifestation of a deeper psychic or spiritual level of reality that people are connected to. A reality that is a result of some type of karmic progress that shows in peoples lives.